My dad had had what his doctors called an ischemic stroke caused by a blood clot in his brain. When we got to the hospital, his speech was unintelligible and there was no way he could walk. I had run into the emergency room calling for help and within minutes he’d been wheeled in while I had shouted out exactly what had transpired in the kitchen. After a scan to make sure that the stroke wasn’t caused by a brain hemorrhage, he was put on blood thinners to loosen and break up the clot. But a great deal of damage had already been done.
After a week in the hospital, my dad came home unable to walk and unable to speak clearly. The part of his brain that controls movement and speech had been damaged. His left side was particularly weak, and he was unable even to feed himself.
I drove him back and forth to the rehabilitation clinic in Provo every day, where he spent three to five hours relearning everything from tying his shoes to writing his name.
I learned how to care for him by watching the team of doctors and therapists that worked with him each day. My brothers and their wives assisted where they could. Jacob took most of the farm work on, and I gratefully left that in his capable hands. Often, one of my sister-in-laws would drive Dad to rehabilitation or bring him home, spelling me on one stretch or another, but for the most part I was the caregiver, and I took on his care with a ferocious determination that he would be whole again. I had lost too many, and my dad would not be numbered with them.
Within a couple months he was walking with a walker and making considerable strides in other areas. His words were not nearly as slurred, although he’d lost some of his cognitive ability and would sometimes forget what we’d talked about only moments before. I’d asked him once what does ‘two plus two equal?’ After thinking for a moment he’d responded - “What’s a two?”
Even his sense of touch was affected. He couldn’t tell hot from cold - it was as if the signal triggering sensation was off somewhere in his brain. One day he washed his hands under scalding water, not knowing he was burning them.
During the week he spent in the hospital right after his stroke, I called the Dean of Admissions at Brigham Young University, as well as the director of the music department whom I’d met with upon accepting my scholarship. After briefing them on my situation, both had been truly kind and told me that the scholarship would be deferred until the following school year. As I hung up the phone I knew I wouldn’t be using it.
I stopped playing the piano after my dad’s stroke. The first weeks after he was able to come home I was too tired to do anything but see to his needs. I fed him, bathed him, and took him through the exercises I’d been shown that would help him to regain the strength and mobility he had lost. And of course, the long hours in rehabilitation took up the months that followed. Every once in a while I would finger the keys, waiting for that familiar pull in my veins, but the music that had once been forever dancing in my thoughts was strangely silent. I didn’t let myself dwell on it. I don’t know if it was exhaustion or just an unwillingness to face what was happening to me.
Then I stopped listening to classical music when I ran. Instead, I borrowed Tara’s iPod and listened to Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney – according to Tara they were ‘real men in cowboy hats.’ My dad had always loved George Strait and Johnny Cash. I found the music occupied my thoughts while I ran and left my heart untouched - which was just what I wanted.
When my dad was well enough for me to leave him for any length of time I started teaching piano lessons. Financially we were in trouble, and I needed to work. But the lessons were noisy, and our house was small and not conducive to a recovering stroke patient who needed a great deal of rest, so the bishop of our church gave me permission to use one of the rooms in the church to teach my students. By that time it was summer, and school was out. I could schedule my students around my dad’s rehab schedule. But when school started, my students would not be able to accommodate me as easily, and I needed an additional source of income that still had some flexibility. I had to do something else.
Tara had gone to beauty school and graduated the year before with big dreams and blue hair. One evening she made an off-hand suggestion that I could take classes at the beauty college in the hours my dad was doing his rehabilitation. I decided that cutting hair would be as good a way as any for me to stay close to home and pay the bills. Jared lived in Provo, about ten minutes from the hospital, and when I wasn’t out of class in time to pick my dad up, he would pick him up and take him to his house until I was finished with classes. Somehow we stumbled through that year and, unlike Tara, I graduated with my hair color mostly intact, and no dreams to speak of.
Tara had wanted out of Levan and had gotten grunt work in a pricey salon in Salt Lake City, hoping to learn from the best and work her way up. I’m sure Louise would have like her to come work with her at Ballow’s ‘Do, but she wasn’t surprised at Tara’s need to do her own thing. Tara’s lack of interest in the family business helped me, because Louise let me work in her shop. I was able to cut hair in the day and teach piano students in the evenings, and my dad and I limped along, financially and otherwise.
Tara was the kind of stylist who experimented on everyone who knew her with mixed results. My hair went through several different shades and cuts before Tara’s mom pulled Tara aside and kindly but firmly told her she was to experiment on someone else. I was a perfect guinea pig as I had absolutely no interest in how I looked. In beauty school I had practiced on her as well, with much more conservative results, and though I would never be as creative as Tara was, I was conscientious and precise. My loneliness made me a good listener, and I was able to give customers what they wanted, rather than what I thought would bring out their inner sex kitten, as Tara was prone to do.